Here Come The Girls

A DVD showcase for lesbian short films: about fucking time! Here Come The Girls would be a welcome release regardless of content, and, despite a few false notes, it’s definitely worth sifting through. The less ambitious efforts cover cheating heterosexual wives (A Soft Place), coming out angst (Below the Belt), growing old (Congratulations Daisy Graham) and bedroom politics (Happy Birthday) – these all suffer from being just a bit, well, dull. But then Abbe Robinson’s Private Life, is, if you overlook rather cheesecakey production values, a feisty and imaginative take on gender reversal in repressed 50s England, while Dani and Alice urgently tackles issues of stereotyping and domestic violence. The stand-outs include: Wicked Desire (a Texan mother gets a shock revelation); (the star of the disk) Guinevere Turner’s mysterious Late; and Fem, a performance art montage celebrating femininity and sexuality throughout the ages, from empowerment and submissiveness to defiance against the witch-hunters. Take that Lars von Trier!